Hayseed Dixie

Hayseed Dixie

27 Jan 2018 (20:00)

€22,50 (€20 members)
A couple of tickets left in the bar

You think you want the Truth. At least that’s what you tell yourself. Well, in our opinions and based upon our experience, so-called “Truth” is always from some perspective or other, and is often not especially useful or even interesting. But anyways, since we’ve got a few extra minutes on our hands for just this once, we’ll give you some . . . ahem . . .

TRUTH

As Marvin Gaye sang so beautifully, “Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.” You’re reading this, which entails seeing rather than hearing, unless you’re reading out-loud and talking to yourself, in which case maybe you’re seeing and hearing, but anyways . . . if you listen to Marvin Gaye, and you should listen to Marvin Gaye, because he was the greatest singer ever to walk the face of the Earth, then you should believe about half of what you read below. But before we go any further, let us agree that Marvin Gaye was the greatest singer who has ever walked the face of this Earth, and if you don’t think so, then please stop reading here, right now, really, sincerely, stop reading now. And go listen to some Marvin Gaye by CLICKING HERE.

If you don’t believe what you read here, then please do head on over to Wikipedia, where you (and also anybody and everybody else) can write their own version of the Truth, or of any complete and utter Hundescheiße which happens to strike your fancy at any given moment. Apparently, anonymously-authored pseudo-factual kinder-narrative is even considered to be credible these days, since the BBC links directly from their page to Wikipedia’s page on us for its official biography of us (click that whole linked clause of the sentence for confirmation that we are indeed telling you the whole truth and nothing but - note the second sentence, in which we say that the band plays in a “Smooth Upinya style,” whatever that means, simply to demonstrate that anyone can say anything on Wikipedia. If it doesn’t say that now, it simply means that somebody else has anonymously edited it again since we wrote this). Jeder tut’s auf seine Weise.

Hayseed Dixie began one day in the Summer of 2000 when John Wheeler and Mike Daly drank roughly enough whiskey to float a battleship from the Florida Coast over to Medjoul Date country and decided to mess around in John’s studio.

But wait, you ask! Why did John have a studio to mess around in? Because he had just recently created the internet, albeit for a different purpose than it has come to serve for most people. John originally created the World Wide Web as a place for folks like himself to trade and exchange used pornography. At that time, it was not so easy to monetize and thereby protect these sorts of innovations, and folks like Former US Senator and Vice President Al Gore and his (at that time) wife, Tipper, were easily able to use their (at that time) significant political and financial influence in the (at that time) thriving porn industry to steal this creation right out from under John and to forthright reform and remake it into the shameless, endless-stream-of-advertising shill that the internet has become today (have you seen, for example, the amazing deals you can get on rose trellis?!? CLICK HERE NOW~!!!!!!). But we digress . . .

Marvin Gaye. Just because Marvin Gaye.

Moving right along, our hero (or anti-hero, we just don’t know, since one man’s liberation army is another man’s goon squad) John, having the good sense to know that - Man muss wissen wann man verloren hat - had taken his payoff from the new owners of the WWW and bought a proper pile of recording equipment. Thus, when he and Mike discovered in said aforementioned drunken epiphany that the Lost Highway of Reverend Hank Williams and the Highway to Hell of Bishop Bon Scott were indeed the same, identical stretch of tarmac, they were well and truly prepared to document this revelation in situ. East Nashville, Tennessee in the Summer of 2000 was a proper party place (you should have been there, really, you should have) and a few friends stopped by and drank some whiskey and played and sang on this recording here and there. And 10 AC/DC songs were suddenly recorded forever anew, entirely reinvented as Appalachian Mountain hillbilly rave-ups. Everyone danced around the studio room and out onto the porch and drank more whiskey. Oh, how they danced.

And then everyone sobered up the next day and proceeded onward back into their own lives. Mike drove to Kansas City or Houston (he can’t honestly remember which) to play pedal steel for Hank WIlliams Jr. like he did most days, and John continued walking up to girls he found even moderately attractive - which tended to be girls with orange or at least orange-ish hair tied back and normally also wearing glasses - in the coffee shops of East Nashville mumbling about the gestation period of the White Giraffe, the sexual politics of the Even Tempered Scale, and other such charmingly inept innuendo, like he did most days.

But as the seed is planted, so the tree shall grow. That very statement is written on the inner sleeve of Journey’s 1980 album, “Departure,” and no truer words have ever been written. We can only use the word “prophistic.” Is that a word? If it wasn’t before, then it is now. Use it yourself whenever opportunity arises and let’s see how long it takes before “prophistic” appears in the Oxford English Dictionary!

Much to everyone’s complete surprise, lot’s of morning radio shows across the US suddenly began to play the aforementioned Hayseed Dixie reworkings of AC/DC songs in the Spring of 2001; to this day, nobody involved has any honest idea how these radio stations all seemed to get their hands on the stuff all at roughly the same time. I mean, originally there were something like 20 copies burned onto CD-Rs on a laptop and passed around to buddies, and that was all the “promotion” anybody did. But deals with record labels (which used to exist in meaningful ways in those distant times) ensued, and live band members were recruited; among these were the great Jake Bakesnake Byers on bass and the Brothers Reno on banjo and mandolin. Tours were booked. Hell, passports were even obtained for all of the band members as early as 2003. It was exciting and educational for everyone involved, not in the least because everyone was finally able to experience first-hand the various health care systems of most of the different nations around the First World and to finally make an informed evaluation - conclusion: we’re really getting proper screwed in the US.

And John dedicated himself fully and completely to the intensely personal anthropological and linguistic research which has become his raison d’etra and modus operandi, fully convinced that if he could just, for one brief and fleeting moment in temporal consciousness, clearly and distinctly understand what the singularly most offensive curses in every world language each shared in common with the other, then he could fully and comprehensively articulate, finally once and for all, a Unified Field Theory of what people would universally, at their ultimate shared core, like to pretend (and to have everyone around them believe that they believe) actually matters to them. This research is ongoing and continues through and likely past the date of this writing, and is, at present, promising though inconclusive.

Only in the English language can the sentence, “The faith he had had had had no effect,” make any sense. (Auf deutsch, das bedeutet ungefähr: „Der Glaube, der er hatte hätte, hätte keinen Effekt hatte.“ Alles klar? Leider nein.)

Only in German can the sentence, “Die Ausfallwahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung des Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz sieht wie Scheiße aus!” make any sort of sense at all whatsoever. (It means, roughly translated to English, “The calculation of the probability of failure of the law regulating the delegation which monitors the labelling of beef looks like shit!” Those are real German words, by the way.)

Life is way too short to drink anything you don’t honestly enjoy drinking. Go ahead. Pour it down the toilet. You’ll thank yourself tomorrow. Seriously. You will.

If Hayseed Dixie and thus Rockgrass hadn’t been created by John Wheeler and Mike Daly in the summer of 2000, then God (Allah, Bodhisattva, YHWH, Ra, Someonekeepsmovingmychair, “insert God of your choice here”) would have had to create Rockgrass at that exact moment anyway - because it was the necessary logical outgrowth of the confluence of the many major popular musical styles preponderant at the time (2001 - today), all of which had ultimately proposed their own respective heads so far up inside of their own respective hinter regions that they could no longer see their own purported audiences through their own major intestines.

Since 2001, Hayseed Dixie has continued to perform a live touring schedule of around 100 shows per year every year in dozens of countries - click here for PAST DATES confirmation.

Marvin Gaye is the greatest singer of all time - click HERE for confirmation.

Hayseed Dixie has a new album and tour for 2015, called “Hair Down To My Grass”. It is their greatest record yet. Of course it is. It is their most recent record.

Hayseed Dixie on stage is currently:

John Wheeler aka Barley Scotch - who is the singer and philologist of the band, the man who is not afraid to say “Perkele!” to the face of any speaker of any language, including Suomi; the developer of a vaccine for Vacca (which means “cow” in Latin and can be creatively employed as a blasphemous swear in contemporary Italian, ain’t it funny how old curses die hard). For example: Vacca Madonna! He’s the reason guitars have 6 strings, and then sometimes 5, and then sometimes 4, and even, on occasion, 3.

Jake Bakesnake Byers - who has the greatest beard to ever exist in the Western World, and quite possibly the Eastern World as well. As soon as they stop shooting and beheading each other over the lengths of each others’ beards, Jake looks forward to going over to a few of these purported places and showing them all just how few of their own actual hairs most of these dudes have growing on their scrotum sacks, at least in comparison with both his face and his ballsack. Jake currently has a side project called “Dreadsack” - a ska band consisting of members with dreadlocked natty scrotums.

Johnny Butten - who apparently holds the Guinness Book of World Records title for “World’s Fastest Banjo Player,” but if that’s weathered the years anything like Guinness beer, it certainly ain’t what it used to be. We tried to drink some Guinness beer in both Dublin and Belfast last year. Umm . . . . well . . . err . . . let’s just say . . . 2005 was a significantly better vintage . . . Johnny is the only member of the band who doesn’t drink, because somebody has to be ready and able to drive the damn van when everybody has to get the hell out of town fast! Which happens frequently on some tours.

Hippy Joe Hymas - Joe’s feet would eat no meat, his mouth would eat none neither, but if one could choose to call meat booze, then he’d drink all the blood of a Kaiser. Joe is the newest fresh meat, ladies, though he has chosen (for reasons the rest of the band doesn’t understand at all) to live out his days eating only plants rather than a combination of plants and animals. As of this writing, he has no STDs of which he is aware. And no salmonella or trichinosis or trichomonas either. But he’s waiting. It looks just like a Telefunken U-47 (with denim).

Speaking of touring, the band’s current TOUR DATES are here

And if you are madder than Hell and you’re not gonna take it anymore that Hayseed never plays a show in your town, please read THE TOUR PRIMER HERE TO LEARN WHAT YOU CAN AND CAN’T PRODUCTIVELY DO ABOUT IT.

The above “Tour Primer” actually applies to almost every band, whether or not the members of said band actually have their individual finger sufficiently on the pulse of their own careers to be cognisant of these facts or otherwise.

Any questions? Of course you still have questions. We certainly do. And we should discuss them in person, up close, where we can smell your pheromones and look into your eyes and wonder why you’re covering up all of your good sexy natural aroma with that horrible chemical garbage they sell you in department stores . . .